Stop the Twitter spam sumall paper.li fllwrs

Apr 6, 2015 • Jonathan Frappier

There are many tools out there that can help you manage your social media presence, unfortunately some of these tools take to the equivalent of spamming your followers with auto posted tweets, probably the most egregious of them is Sumall. You know the “How I did on twitter this week” tweets.

There are others, not to pick soley on small.com, like fllwrs.com, paper.li, and VMware Advocacy tweets to name a few. While they are a nice guideline for you as an individual to see, it really offers no value to your followers. There are a couple of ways to stop this. First is to unauthorize the application from your Twitter settings:

Log into Twitter

Click on your profile picture in the upper right corner and select Settings

Click on Apps and see a list of all the applications you have given permission to use your Twitter account

Click the Revoke access button next to the app

Now keep in mind, this will block the application from using your Twitter account. As I mentioned before some of these tools can be handy to you personally. The other option is to disable auto tweets directly from the application itself. For example for sumall its:

Log into sumall.com

Go to Account Settings

Click on Twitter preferences

Disable any notification

Now, you can continue to use those tools while not spamming your followers. If there are other tools you are using, please share the directions in the comments about how to turn off the auto tweets.

Boy, social media is proving tough to have some discussions for me lately - here is the first of two three blog posts to set my position straight. Yesterday a conversation got started on Twitter based on a tweet shared by John Troyer “Devs Rool, IT Droolz” - in fact here is another point of view on the conversation from Rynardt Spies. Now as an “infrastructure” person you may think my take here is about saving my job, or staying relevant or some such thing but it is nothing at all about that - its about working together. In fact, those who know me well know that I am trying to push the “infrastructure people” into a more application focus, not necessarily development, but stop being infrastructure focused and work on being able to deliver applications and value to the business. I’ve never had a CFO walk into my office and say a virtual machine was down or a VLAN was misconfigured, but they know when their application is down.